CORPORATE

FINANCIALIZATION
AND WORKER
PROSPERITY:
A BROKEN LINK

REPORT BY LENORE PALLADINO

JANUARY 2018
 ABOUT THE ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lenore Palladino is Senior Economist and Policy Counsel at We thank Susan R. Holmberg,
the Roosevelt Institute, where she brings expertise to Mike Konczal, J.W. Mason, and
Roosevelt’s work on inequality and finance. Lenore was most Mark Paul for their comments
recently Vice President for Policy and Campaigns at Demos, and insight. Roosevelt staff Nell
where she built Demos’s strategic campaigns department. Her Abernathy, Kendra Bozarth,
research and writing focus on financial reform, financial Rakeen Mabud, Katy Milani,
taxation, labor rights, and fiscal crises. Her publications have Jennifer R Miller, Marshall
appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, State Tax Notes, Steinbaum, Steph Sterling,
and other venues. Victoria Streker, and Alex
Tucciarone all contributed to
the project.

This report was made possible

with generous support from the
Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg
Foundation, and Arca Foundation.
Executive Summary
In the era of increased financialization, the ability of workers to bargain for a greater share
of firm profits has eroded. Corporate financialization—the increasing share of profits
earned from financial activity and the increasing flow of profits to shareholders—is a key
driver of this economic inequality. Such corporate behavior leads to the economic puzzle we
see today: record corporate profits and share prices, coupled with low corporate investment
and wage growth.

This paper explores the roots of corporate financialization for America’s large public
companies. The increased pressure from financial markets to keep share prices high and
avoid hostile takeovers means that the top job of corporate executives has shifted from
managing rising sales to managing rising share price. This leads not only to pressure to
keep wages from rising and keep investment costs low, but also to the fissured workplace
itself. The rise of shareholder primacy has meant that there is simply less available for
employee compensation, as profit must flow out to shareholders and creditors. The long-
term consequences for companies may be declines in skill level and difficulties in improving
the productivity of labor. The long-term consequences for employees include stagnant
wages. The increasing share of profit earned off of financial assets means that workers may
be needed less, as firms make money off of financial activity rather than their traditional
business. Finally, because executives have been transformed into shareholders themselves,
their incentive to prioritize share price over productivity growth is personal. The scale of
corporate profits going to financial uses debunks the claim that increased compensation for
employees is out of reach.

In this paper, I focus on financialization in the non-financial corporate (NFC) sector of

the economy, which has received comparatively less attention than the dominance of the
rising financial sector. Though corporations are currently driving economic inequality, it is
important to remember that corporations can, in theory, be creators of economic prosperity.
America’s public companies have moved away from investing in the productivity of workers
by paying stable wages and rewarding skill growth and longevity, thus decreasing the
innovation that they are able to produce and the profits they are able to earn. It is essential
to reverse the incentives that drive corporate behavior—for workers, for firms, and for our
economy. Therefore, along with policies that raise the minimum wage through legislation
and improve the bargaining power of wages through unionization, it is critical to rewrite tax,
corporate governance, and other public policies that have driven firms to financialize.

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Introduction
The increasing financialization of America’s large public companies has had a profound
effect on labor markets. Wages are stagnant, income inequality has grown, and corporate
America is no longer a provider of stable employment for middle-class workers. Common
explanations include globalization, the rising power of the financial sector itself, the
decline of trade union power, and skill-biased technical change. However, changes in how
corporations earn profits, and how they use those profits—the two strands of behavior that
I call corporate financialization—are key drivers of rising economic insecurity, and require
further consideration.

Rising corporate profits—driven in large part by increasing market concentration—have been

disproportionately captured by the wealthy rather than reinvested in the firm (Gutiérrez and
Philippon 2017; Mason 2015). I define “corporate financialization” as the mechanism for such
capture, specifically through the rise of two kinds of financial activities within firms. First,
corporate firms are holding a rising proportion of financial assets, and, consequently, earn an
increasing proportion of total profit from such assets, versus the profit that they earn from
their normal business activity (Krippner 2005). Second, profits are increasingly used to drive
up rising short-term share prices, and are captured by shareholders, rather than invested in
labor or capital (Mason 2015). These changes mean a higher proportion of corporate cash
goes to shareholders and the purchasing of financial assets, while less is available for workers
and productive investment. This leads to the economic puzzle we see today: record corporate
profits and share prices, coupled with low corporate investment and wage growth.

This leads to the economic puzzle we see today:

record corporate profits and share prices, coupled
with low corporate investment and wage growth.

Since firms are made up of different constituencies and allocations of profit—including

employees, executives, and shareholders, as well as short- and long-term productive
investment—a rising proportion of profit flowing to one set of stakeholders or uses
will result in a decline in what is available for the others. The rise in firms’ savings and
holding of financial assets has meant firms are net lenders rather than net borrowers in a
macroeconomic sense, undermining the traditional notion that the financial sector itself
exists to support corporate investment. The set of public policies that have incentivized
financial asset-holding and increasing financial flows to shareholders must be taken on
directly in order to improve the economic security of the American people.

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In this paper, I focus on financialization in the non-financial corporate (NFC) sector of the
economy, which has received comparatively less attention than the dynamic of the rising
financial sector. First, I describe the current state of America’s public corporations and
labor markets. Next, I examine the two corporate financialization flows: first, the rise of
financial profits, versus profits earned off of the sales of goods and services; second, the rise
of short-termism1 and shareholder maximization. In each section, I will review some of
the literature that defines these phenomena and focus on research that demonstrates the
impact on wages, employment, and the fissured workplace.

Numerous researchers document the rise of financial profit-making within NFCs and
examine its relationship with declining productive investment and declining labor market
outcomes. Others focus on the increase of capital market pressures and ethos of shareholder
value maximization. Krippner (2005), Lin et. al (2014), and L. Davis (2013) define corporate
financialization as the rising ratio of financial profit earned off of financial assets, relative to
business profits earned from the regular trade of the corporation. Other researchers, such as
Lazonick (2014) and Mason (2015), focus on the increase of unproductive stock repurchases
and dividend payments as a primary measure of the rise of shareholder maximization as
the modus operandi of the firm. This paper combines the two lenses on corporate activity to
follow the flows of profits into—and out of—the firm.

“Financial assets” in the NFC context refers to the holdings of cash and short-term
investments, current receivables, advances, and a miscellaneous category of “other”
financial assets. Financial asset holdings are not trivial: The Financial Times has
documented how, in 2015, NFC financial holdings topped $2 trillion for the first time,
outstripping the asset holdings of traditional Wall Street asset managers.2 Just 30 U.S.
companies have portfolios of cash, securities, and investments worth more than $1.2 trillion;
holdings of corporate debt and commercial paper are at a record $432 billion, as companies
avoided repatriating cash for tax purposes and instead looked for riskier investment
opportunities. The Financial Times noted that the fact that NFCs are “pumping excess
cash into bonds reinforces the depressing fact that many companies don’t see attractive
investment opportunities in their business lines, helping explain the lack of stronger
economic activity and mediocre wage gains for workers in recent years.”3

Before focusing entirely on the process of financialization within NFCs, it is useful to define
the term “financialization” as it pertains to the entire economy.4 The term is commonly

1
Defined by Abernathy et al. (2016), “Short-termism is a corporate philosophy that prioritizes immediate increases in share
price and payouts at the expense of long-term business investment and growth.”
2
See Financial Times, “Microsoft Shows How Corporate Cash Piles Blur Lines with Wall St,” September, 15, 2017.
3
See Financial Times, “Corporate Bondholders Heighten Market Risk,” September 14, 2017.
4
For a full discussion of the shifts in the financial sector and the impact of financialization on American culture, see Konczal
and Abernathy (2015).

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used to describe the rising share of profit accruing to the financial sector (as opposed to
non-financial corporations) and the shift in the culture towards a market orientation.5
Konczal and Abernathy (2015) define financialization as encompassing four core elements:
savings, power, wealth, and society. They further define it as “the growth of the financial
sector, its increased power over the real economy, the explosion in the power of wealth,
and the reduction of all of society to the realm of finance.” Epstein (2015, p. 5) describes
financialization as “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial
actors, and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international
economies.” Epstein and Jayadev (2005) examined the rentier share of national income,
i.e. the rising profits of financial firms plus the interest income generated by non-financial
firms and households, to describe the rise of financial sector’s power in the economy. Other
authors link financialization to broad macroeconomic trends of declining growth and
compare the structural forces of financialization and neoliberalism.6

Financialization is defined as “the growth of the

financial sector, its increased power over the real
economy, the explosion in the power of wealth, and
the reduction of all of society to the realm of finance.”

Though corporations are currently driving economic inequality, it is important to remember

that corporations can, in theory, be creators of economic prosperity. Lazonick (2013)
outlines the “Theory of Innovative Enterprise,” in which innovation drives the creation
of higher-quality products at lower unit costs, benefitting consumers. Innovation stems
from a “retain-and-reinvest” model of corporate resource allocation, in which corporations
retain profit and crucially invest in the productivity of workers by paying stable wages and
rewarding skill growth and longevity, in order to increase the innovation that they are able
to produce and thus the profits they are able to earn.7 It is due to a reliance on profits earned
from improving productivity that workers are able to bargain for an increased share of
profits in the form of higher wages and benefits. As will be explored below, America’s firms
today have moved to the other end of the spectrum from this idealized version of corporate
purpose, making it essential to reverse the incentives that drive corporate behavior.

5
See, for example, G. Davis (2011); Epstein (2005); and Palley (2007).
6
Palley (2008) argues that financialization may be culpable for the growth of income inequality in the United States,
and that the “defining feature of financialization in the U.S. has been the increase in the volume of debt.” Palley argues
further that “financialization is a particular form of neoliberalism. That means neoliberalism is the driving force behind
financialization and the latter cannot be understood without an understanding of the former.” (See also Lapavitsas (2013);
Dunhaupt (2014, p. 8) for a useful chart outlining the stylized facts in the two theoretical frameworks.)
7
Zeynap Ton describes a similar model in The Good Jobs Strategy, in which she examines specific firms and how their
investment in their workforce results in higher customer satisfaction, profit, and market share.

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The Decline of the Public Corporation
and the Rise of Economic Insecurity
The postwar era saw the rise of the corporation and the linkage of stable corporate
employment with basic family needs, like a stable income, health care, and retirement,
though the availability of such employment was deeply stratified by race and gender
(G. Davis 2016).8 Firms depended on a steady workforce, and unions were able to make
significant gains for their members, while hired managers came to wield significant
authority over the decisions of the firm. Starting in the 1980s, there have been significant
shifts in the structure of large corporations and a concurrent long-term decline in
employment security for workers. Though there are exceptions, the major transition that
took place in the 1980s was from a corporate model, in which success ultimately rested on
the growth of sales, to one that focused on maximizing returns for shareholders.

Beginning in the late 20th century, workers became the largest cost to cut in pursuit of
strong capital market valuation. Gerald Davis (2016) describes how highly conglomerated
firms that had been undervalued by the stock market were broken up through a wave of
hostile takeovers in the 1980s. As firms became more responsive to capital market pressures
and takeover threats, the labor accords of the postwar era became subject to rising cost
scrutiny. By the 1990s, maximizing shareholder value had become the dominant mode for
public corporations, driven by legal and regulatory shifts under the Reagan administration.
Lead firms (e.g. Nike) focused on brand value over production and spun off to global
suppliers, enabled by the rise of information and communication technologies (ICTs).
Large-scale layoffs and rising benefits insecurity ensued—American mainstays like Sara
Lee went from 154,000 to 10,000 employees in 10 years, and the computer and electronics
industry as a whole lost 750,000 jobs. Since creating shareholder value was at odds with
long-term, well-paid employment, employee cost-cutting became the norm and the labor
market as a whole was destabilized.

By the 1990s, maximizing shareholder value had

become the dominant mode for public corporations,
driven by legal and regulatory shifts under the
Reagan administration.

8
See The Vanishing American Corporation for a full description of the shifts in public corporations over the last
hundred years.

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Weil (2014) documents a substantially similar process by focusing on the fissured
workplace. He shows that as large corporations increasingly focused on core competencies
in response to investor pressure to raise share prices, they moved a percentage of their
workforce out of direct employment through subcontracting, outsourcing, or franchising.
Non-professional workers were no longer considered central to firm productivity—rather,
firm profit required keeping overall labor costs as cheap as possible and getting rid of all
the ancillary costs of direct employment. Pressure from the financial markets caused
companies to shed increasing numbers of non-core employees. This reduced the ability
of workers to claim a share of any increasing profit made by the lead firm. Fundamentally,
labor was shifted from “a wage setting problem into a contracting decision” (Weil 2014).9

Measuring the Rise of Corporate

Financialization
The shifts in corporate behavior have led to an emphasis within firms on financial assets
and shareholder value. But to analyze the impact of this shift on workers specifically, it
is important to first measure increasing corporate financialization directly. Two types of
measurements are important: first, the proportional rise of financial assets and income
earned off of such assets, relative to profit earned from selling goods and services; second,
the relative proportion of overall firm profit flowing to payouts to shareholders. These
shifts have happened within the context of rising corporate profits, along with stagnant
wages. Chen, Karabarbounis, and Neiman (2017) document two key shifts in global
corporate behavior that show the rise of corporate financialization across industries
and countries. First, corporate savings rose as a proportion of global savings, driven by
increasing corporate profits;10 such savings become, in a macroeconomic sense, the funds
available for the rest of the economy to borrow, and corporations are now net lenders to
the rest of the economy. Since corporate profits are allocated to payments to labor, capital,
taxes, and savings, they show that since the labor share declined, and taxes and dividends
remained steady, corporate savings rose de facto. Second, they show how this increase in
savings is actually used within the firm; firms can reinvest savings in productive investment,
or accumulate cash or other financial assets (one of the first indicators of increased
financialization), repay debt, or increase share repurchases (the second major indicator of

9
For a full discussion of the shifts in lead firm employment, see The Fissured Workplace.
10
Elsewhere in their analysis they discuss the drivers of increased corporate profits: a declining real interest rate, the price
of investment goods, and declining corporate taxes. They do not discuss declining bargaining power of labor.

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increased financialization). They document that productive investment did not keep pace
with rising corporate savings, meaning that all of the other uses of increasing savings grew
as well. In other words, they conclude:

“Given that dividend payments and investment did not increase much as a share of
value added (profits), firms used part of the increased flow of savings to repurchase
their shares and part of it to accumulate cash and other types of financial assets” (Chen,
Karabarbounis, and Neiman 2017, p. 37).

In the rest of this section, I will discuss the literature that extends this analysis to the
United States.

RISING FINANCIAL INCOME WITHIN

NON-FINANCIAL CORPORATIONS
The first way to measure corporate financialization is to look at the increase in income
that firms make from financial assets and rising financial asset-holding. Krippner (2005)
presents evidence for a shifting “pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily
through financial channels rather than through trade or commodity production…
‘[f ]inancial’ refers to activities relating to the provision (or transfer) of liquid capital in
expectation of future interest, dividends, or capital gains” (p. 174). In other words, the
“lens” she uses to analyze changes in American business is to look at how profits are
generated, rather than how employment has changed or the type of output has shifted.11
Krippner measured the increasing ratio of portfolio income—income earned off of financial
assets—to revenue from productive activities, looking at the total earnings accruing to
NFCs from interest,12 dividends, and realized capital gains on financial investments; and
measuring revenue using corporate cash flow (profits plus depreciation allowances).
She finds that the ratio began to climb in the 1970s and peaked in the 1980s at a level
that was five times the ratio typical in the preceding decades. Notably, in the 1970s it was
manufacturing firms who led the shift to relying on an increasing share of profit from
financial activity (Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013). Krippner also found that the rise in
interest income largely drove the surge in portfolio income, whereas capital gains and
dividends held steady, demonstrating that a growing stock market cannot fully explain
NFC financialization.

11
Krippner (2005) characterizes this as an activity-centric (versus an accumulation-centric) view of the economy. She
compares the “pictures” of the economy that emerge from the different viewpoints, showing that examining shifts in
employment and output do not properly reveal the rise of financial income within “real economy” firms.
12
This is the use of corporate cash in the financial sector, loaning it out as commercial paper to earn a return.

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 The first way to measure corporate financialization is
to look at the increase in income that firms make from
financial assets and rising financial asset-holding.

Lin (2015) shows how firms shifted into holding a rising proportion of financial assets.13
Specifically, in the 1980s and 1990s, ownership of financial assets varied with the business
cycle, but since the 2000s there has been a steady rise of such ownership (Lin 2017). This
ownership is highly concentrated in large firms: Just 30 U.S. companies have amassed
holdings of more than $1.2 trillion worth of cash, securities, and financial investments.
Roughly 70 percent is held overseas—crucially, financial investment can be conducted
without bringing the profit “home” to the U.S., whereas productive investments require
such repatriation and payment of U.S. corporate taxes.14

Krippner (2012) posits that rising financial asset-holding was initially driven in the high
interest rate environment of the 1980s, when it was a bad time to be a borrower and a good
time to be a lender. Corporate cash was directed towards higher-yield short-term financial
assets rather than borrowing for investment purposes at extraordinarily high interest rates.
The push to increase short-term returns rose with the threat of takeovers, driven by newly
emboldened activist investors. In the current era, as interest rates have stayed historically low,
for large firms at least, financial asset-ownership may still provide a higher return in the short-
term than putting corporate cash to work where the gains require a long-term focus. The
challenge is to reorient public policy, so that it rewards investment in long-term, sustainable
productivity, rather than incentivizing short-term gains from financial asset-holding.

THE SHIFT TO SHAREHOLDER

VALUE MAXIMIZATION
A robust literature15 documents the second strand of corporate financialization: the
dominant ideology of shareholder value maximization and related shifts in executive pay.
As firms were driven by pressure from shareholders to maximize profits and share value in
order to fund higher dividends and returns from selling shares, rising share price became
the core concern of firm management. The rise of institutional investors and ownership
by large financial institutions, such as private equity funds, drove the transition away from

13
Financial assets can range from in-house credit cards to commercial paper and riskier assets.
14
See Financial Times, “U.S. Companies Transformed into 800lb Gorilla in Bond Market,” September 12, 2017.
15
A review of the literature documenting this rise is beyond the scope of this paper; see, for example, Lazonick (2014); G.
Davis (2015); Epstein 2015; Parenteau (2005); Appelbaum and Batt (2014); and Dallas (2012).

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long-term stock holding and towards short-term stock trading. This focus on short-term
outcomes distinguishes shareholders from sharesellers (Lazonick, Hopkins, and Jacobson
2015), as the focus on short-term gain hurts the very kinds of productive investment that
can provide for longer-term sustainable growth of firm output.

Focus on short-term outcomes distinguishes

shareholders from sharesellers, as the focus on
short-term gain hurts the very kinds of productive
investment that can provide for longer-term
sustainable growth of firm output.

This rise in shareholder primacy can be seen most directly from the exponential growth
in stock buybacks, in which public corporations buy back shares of their own stock on the
open market, increasing their share price (as fewer shares remain) without improving
their product or finding new customers (Lazonick 2014). This has the direct consequence
of reducing the earnings that are retained within the firm. Before the 1970s, American
corporations paid out 50 percent of profits to shareholders and retained the rest for
investment. Now, shareholder payments are 90 percent of reported profits (Lazonick 2014).
Buybacks are a speculative mechanism that do not provide new productive capital to firms;
instead, they raise share prices directly, rewarding the selling of stock. From 2006 to 2015,
the firms that make up the S&P 500 spent 54 percent of net income on buybacks ($3.9
trillion). This has the direct effect of benefitting shareholders who can sell stock at higher
prices and the corporate executives whose pay is largely stock-based. This activity is largely
confined to the largest American firms, and examples from among America’s top name
brands abound. Investigating McDonald’s, Lazonick, Hopkins, and Jacobson (2015) show
how the iconic American firm expended $29.4 billion on buybacks from 2005-2014, which
equated to 67 percent of net income. McDonald’s, like many firms, conducts buybacks even
when the stock price is relatively high, which is a further waste of corporate cash. In 2017,
Walmart announced a new $20 billion stock buyback program, following years of billion-
dollar buyback investments, even as its stock was up 17 percent last year.

In the words of Lazonick (2014), “retained earnings are what allow firms to invest in both
[research and development (R&D)] and returning gains to their employees, and exemplify
how an ‘innovative’ firm operates. If retained earnings are reduced due to higher payouts
to shareholders, less is left for innovation and employees.” The following sections will
document the impact of corporate financialization on employees and productive investment.

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Financialization and Labor Markets
In the era of increased financialization, the ability of workers to bargain for a greater share of
firm profits has eroded. Corporate financialization impacts workers in several different ways.
The increased pressure from financial markets to keep share prices high and avoid hostile
takeovers meant that the top job of corporate executives shifted from managing rising sales
to managing rising share price. This led not only to pressure to keep wages from rising, but

In the era of increased financialization, the ability

of workers to bargain for a greater share of firm
profits has eroded.

to the fissured workplace itself—the push by executives to locate increasing proportions of

non-professional workers outside the firm, whether through subcontracting or outsourcing.
In other words, there is simply less available for employee compensation, as profit must
flow out to shareholders and creditors. This has long-term consequences for companies,
as it potentially leads to declines in skill level and difficulties in improving the productivity
of labor, especially when higher fissuring of the workplace occurs. The increasing share of
profit earned off of financial assets also means that workers may be needed less, as firms
make money off of financial activity rather than their traditional function. Finally, because
executives have been transformed into shareholders themselves, their incentive to prioritize
share price over productivity growth is personal. The scale of corporate profits going to
financial uses debunks the claim that increased compensation for employees is out of reach.

The scale of corporate profits going to financial uses

debunks the claim that increased compensation for
employees is out of reach.

Several authors look at the correlation between rising buybacks and declining wages,
showing that corporate funds going to buybacks could be redeployed to rising wages
(Lazonick 2015; Ruetschlin 2014). The scale is startling: As Ruetschlin shows, rather than
spending $6.6 billion on stock buybacks in 2013, Walmart could have raised the wages of
its 825,000 frontline employees by $5.13 per hour if it had chosen to invest in its workers.
Lazonick (2015) shows that while McDonald’s conducted the buyback program described
above, McDonald’s pays the 90,000 U.S. workers that it employs directly one dollar over the
legal minimum wage, bringing the average wage to $9.90 per hour.

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Lin (2015) documents how the rise in financial asset-holding, the substitution of
corporate debt for equity, and shareholder value orientation impacts employment size,
and he specifically considers the disparate effects among different occupational groups:
production employees, service employees, and professional and management employees.
He finds that the increase in financial assets leads to a long-run, significant decline
on blue-collar production workers (whereas there is a positive effect on managerial,
professional, and service employment). Lin also studies how the increased dependence
on debt and its substitution for equity generates a rising pressure to pay interest before
workers’ claims can be considered; this behavior also raises the need to reduce the
workforce during downturns, as creditors still need to be paid. His empirical investigation
shows that both rising debt and the return to shareholders have long-run, negative effects
on all occupational types. Interestingly, the debt ratio has a weaker impact on service
employment than the blue-collar production workforce, whereas the negative effect of
shareholder rewards is strongest vis-a-vis service employment. Lin also finds that the
financialization trends themselves, and their impact on employment size, rose throughout
the last few decades.

Lin & Tomaskovic-Devey (2013) investigate the impact of rising corporate financialization
and income inequality, finding that increased earnings from financial activity is associated
with a falling labor share, increased compensation of top executives, and increased earnings
dispersion among workers. They find that:

“The financialization of the U.S. economy restructured social relations and income
dynamics in the rest of the economy. We believe that firms’ increasing reliance on
financial, rather than production, income decoupled the generation of surplus from
production and sales, strengthening owners’ and elite workers’ negotiating power
against other workers. The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce
from revenue-generating and compensation-setting processes” (p. 1).

Notably, their research finds that financialization had a comparable impact on labor
outcomes with the more common explanations for increased income inequality,
including declining rates of unionization, globalization, technological change, and capital
investment. Their study also conducted a counterfactual analysis, fixing the level of
corporate financialization at what it was in 1970, and examining the difference between
the observed and counterfactual trend. The contrast shows that financialization accounted
for approximately 58 percent of the decline in labor’s share between 1970 and 2008. The
counterfactual showed a lesser but still positive impact on the growth of officers’ share of
compensation (9.6 percent) and 10.2 percent of the growth in earnings dispersion between
1970 and 2008.

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 The contrast shows that financialization accounted
for approximately 58 percent of the decline in labor’s
share between 1970 and 2008.

Dunhaupt (2013) also examines the effect of both strands of corporate financialization
on labor’s share of income, measuring the “distributional conflict” between firms and
shareholders on the one hand and wage and salary earners on the other. She uses net
interest and dividend payments as a share of the capital stock of the business sector as the
proxy for financialization, and finds a positive relationship between the increase of such
payments and the decline of the share of wages in national income. Rising shareholder
value orientation is measured as increased net interest and net dividend payments as a
share of the capital stock of the business sector. She examines results for 13 countries from
1986 to 2007, and finds that the share of retained profits declined along with the labor
share, while dividend and interest payments were rising—pointing to increased corporate
financialization as a causal factor of the decline of the labor share. In subsequent work
(Dunhaupt 2014), she ties increasing shareholder value orientation to wage dispersion, due
to rising executive compensation.

Corporate Financialization and

Productive Investment
Rising corporate financialization has weakened the labor market, but it has also meant that
there is less firm profit available for productive investment. Several researchers document
how the dramatic shift in shareholder payouts and market concentration is correlated
with declining productive investment by firms. In an important pair of papers, Gutierrez
and Philippon (2016, 2017) document how declining investment relative to profit began
in the 2000s, largely explained by increasing market power16 and common ownership
within industries. Such firms also exhibit a disproportionate amount of short-termism and
tightened corporate governance. Specifically, they find that firms that invest less, despite
high profits, spend a disproportionate amount of available cash flow on stock repurchases.
Investment has not fallen because profit has fallen; they show that the average ratio of net

16
Steinbaum and Harris Bernstein (2018) define market power as the ability to skew market outcomes in a participant’s own
interest without creating shared value or serving the public good.

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investment to net operating surplus has fallen from an average of 20 percent between 1959
and 2001 to 10 percent between 2002 and 2015 (Gutiérrez and Philippon 2016, 2017). In
other words, despite available cash, “industries with less competition invest less,” while
governance drives buybacks over productive investment. The paper also examined other
common explanations for low investment, finding explanations based on financial frictions
and globalization to be less persuasive.

Mason (2015) also provides evidence of the break in the link between corporate cash flow
and borrowing and productive investment, showing that since the 1980s, firms largely
borrow to enrich their investors in the short-run.17 This phenomenon reached its zenith
in mid-2007, just before the financial crisis, when aggregate payouts actually exceeded
aggregate investment. Mason shows a dramatic shift over time: In the 1960s and 70s,
an additional dollar of earning or borrowing was associated with a 40-cent increase in
investment. This ratio has been less than 10 cents of each borrowed dollar since the 1980s.
At the same time, shareholder payouts nearly doubled. Mason shows that the net flow of
funds from financial markets to the corporate sector did not shift before and after the Great
Recession, and that the decline in investment cannot be explained by tightening credit
conditions. As he explains, “finance is no longer an instrument for getting money into
productive businesses, but instead for getting money out of them” (p. 3).

“Finance is no longer an instrument for getting

money into productive businesses, but instead for
getting money out of them.”

Demonstrating the importance of productive investment in one critical industry, Lazonick

(2017) examines the financialization of the pharmaceutical industry, concluding that
increased financialization means that profits are not invested in potentially life-saving
innovations in new drugs. Firms in the pharmaceutical sector allocate a disproportionate
share of profits to share repurchase programs, enriching top executives along the way, while
arguing against price regulation in the name of retaining high levels of profits to invest in
innovation. He found that the 18 drug companies in the S&P 50 Index distributed 99 percent
of profits to shareholders from 2006 to 2015, distributed as 50 percent buybacks and 49
percent dividends. This translates to $261 billion spent on buybacks over the decades,
unevenly divided among the 18 firms. Meanwhile, investment in R&D was only 16 percent of
total revenue (Lazonick et al. 2017).

17
Mason’s work also points to the macroeconomic challenge that lower interest rates are not leading to increasing
corporate investment because of the fundamental break in the chain.

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Leila Davis (2013) conducted a firm-level analysis of the constraint on fixed investment18
from increased flows to the financial sector. She defines financialization as an “increasingly
complex” relationship between NFCs and the financial sector, and shows its rise through
the increasing share of financial assets relative to sales and shifts in external financing
(increasing indebtedness), especially for large firms, both of which lead to declining
investment. Specifically, she shows that for large firms, total financial assets increased
from 29.8 percent of sales in 1971 to 47.2 percent in 2011, while fixed capital declined from
52.4 percent to 43.9 percent of sales. Her firm-level data set allows for a more specific
demonstration of the shifting asset mix by disaggregating different assets (cash and short-
term investments current receivables, advances, and “other” financial assets), and she
shows that liquid capital increased 4.2 percentage points for large firms, while “other”
capital increased 8.6 percentage points. She suggests that the move into “other” financial
assets held by large NFCs may reveal a shift into providing financial services, such as car
loans or store credit cards (L. E. Davis 2013).

Investment decisions rely on the value of fixed

investment as well as the decisions of how to finance
it; both have shifted in the last several decades due to
new norms of corporate governance and rising firm-
level volatility.

Davis posits that it is critical to examine the purpose of increased financial profits in order
to more fully understand the impact on fixed investment. Investment decisions rely on the
value of fixed investment as well as the decisions of how to finance it; both have shifted in
the last several decades due to new norms of corporate governance and rising firm-level
volatility. She finds that rising shareholder value maximization is associated with declining
fixed investment in large firms as the pressure of short-termism drives reallocation. For
the largest firms, a one standard deviation increase in average industry-level repurchases
is associated with a .14 standard deviation decline in investment. In contrast, she finds that
“the stock of financial assets is found to have a positive and robust relationship to fixed
investment in both the short-term and the long-run in most specifications” (p. 19). This is
consistent with her explanation that “for given expected returns, firms hold both fixed and
financial assets, and investment actually increases if the stock of financial assets rises above
the desired level.” Especially for large firms, the financial profit rate is positively correlated

18
Fixed investment refers to investment in physical capital and/or assets and technology (in contrast to investments in labor
and financial assets).

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with investment, suggesting “large firms generate complementarities between financial
profits and the non-financial components of their business that are not captured by smaller
firms.” This movement into rising investment as the profit rate rises shows how certain
types of rising financial assets can increase demand for the firm’s non-financial profits,
thereby supporting, rather than hindering, fixed investment.

Orhangazi (2006) outlines a model specifying the two flows of financialization—income

earned off of investment in financial assets and financial payouts—and examines each with
respect to corporate investment. He tests the two effects on a large sample of firms over
the three decades from 1973 to 2003. He finds, as above, that increased financial profit
opportunities crowd out productive investment, as managers chase higher short-term
returns, and that increased payments to shareholders decrease available internal funds,
while also increasing uncertainty. As with Davis, Orhangazi finds that the negative effects
from increased financial profits is mainly felt by large corporations (2006).

Policy Outcomes and Opportunities

for Further Research
Multiple opportunities remain for future research connecting corporate financialization to
labor markets and productive investment. It is important to consider the financialization
of specific sectors and industries, especially industries, such as retail and health care,
where employment is growing and is relatively low-paid: Is there evidence of rising
financialization in such sectors, and what impact, if any, has it had on particular labor
market outcomes? In the case of these sectors, it may be necessary to disaggregate the
change in overall employment from the effects of downward pressure on wages and fissured
workplaces. In other words, overall employment may grow, but employment at lead firms
could fall as a result of continued pressure from financialization, and wages could continue
to stagnate. Also, how does financialization influence innovation, and what impact does
this phenomenon have on consumers? Future research will build on the literature above,
expanding the analysis to specific sectors and new shifts in the behavior of America’s public
corporations. Another strand of research could focus on the effects of financialization
specifically within the largest firms, because the employment effects will be different than
for smaller or medium-sized entities.

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 It is critical to rewrite tax, corporate governance,
and other public policies that have driven firms
to financialize.

As the financialization of the corporate sector continues, it is critical to understand that

none of these shifts are inevitable: all result from policy choices that create incentives and
opportunities for firms to increasingly act as financial actors. Therefore, along with policies
that raise the minimum wage through legislation and improve the bargaining power of
wages through unionization, it is critical to rewrite tax, corporate governance, and other
public policies that have driven firms to financialize. In forthcoming publications, we will
document the opportunities available for incentivizing corporate behavior that will have
the twin impacts of strengthening labor market outcomes and strengthening the long-run
productivity of the firm. America’s working families, and our future prosperity, depend on
this reorientation.

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